How to optimise your WordPress website for Google’s Core Web Vitals?

Would you dare ignore Google’s Core Web Vitals?

You dare ignore it and Google will kick you from its search engine eventually, and you don’t want to take that risk, do you ?

Since you are here, I am pretty sure that either you are either frustrated with your website design or its performance. Whether you own a blog or a personal website, you need to improve Core Web Vitals recently introduced by Google.

Well, if you took care of it and improved your website or blog’s score considering core web vitals, Google will start loving you, your blog, your website and everything about you. Sounds amazing, isn’t it? Well, it is half truth. Let’s get the complete truth and metrics around it.

What are the 3 Core Web Vitals?

Basically, Google wants your website a fast loading in terms of performance, responsiveness and stability. You will see that content writers around the globe and SEO practitioners have developed their own terminology in order to guide and teach their followers about what to do and how to work around in order to achieve the standards laid out by Google.

Google initially introduced above metrics in order to identify how your website will be scored and how it will affect your website and the traffic i.e. your visitors. It is not a rigid guidance for you to comply with, but Google is just providing you with the data in order to practice it in a proper way. So that you can ask your developers to create your website and pages accordingly.

After initiating with the above metrics, Google has further introduced other metrics, but these new metrics provide further info that basically revolves around above core metrics, which are as below.

The above image has been taken from Google’s Page Speed Insights page, which has been recently upgraded to its latest version. Google keep improving its page in order to provide the best possible information, so that even a layman can simply read and interpret the details provided.

You can clearly see that the page describes very clear details for the mobile version of the page and the same details for desktop version of the page. But let’s have a brief look at what does these core metrics mean.

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) tracks when the largest above the fold content element appears;

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) shows how much unexpected layout shifts (ads, pop-ups, etc.) affect a page’s visual stability;

First Input Delay (FID) measures how long it takes for the browser to begin processing the first user interaction on a page.

As per Nitropack

Well, if we keep talking about these core web vitals, this will be a very lengthy post and these details are beyond the scope of this post, as you are here to know how to increase your website score and how can you improve your current website score, isn’t it? However, Google started with 3 main metrics but as you can see they have currently 6 different metrics, which we will discuss in some other post.

Google basically looks at more than 200 factors in order to rank your website. So, we won’t go further in depth. But lets see how you can we improve our website score which is one of the main and basic requirements.

Why is so important to improve Core Web Vitals for your website?

While we are all aware that Google as a search engine dominates the search market and also the paid ads market.

It is very hard as a newbie to enter and win the market straightaway, so what is your best bet?

When you are getting started, it is always the best idea to have a website that is easily readable by robots and atleast Google can give a good score. This is the point when you don’t have any visitor or if you are lucky atleast a few visitors.

So, at this stage, the only visitor Google via its robots should get a good impression about your website or blog, basically your domain. Because once visitors start coming on your platform with the help of your content, products and offers Google will further analyse and index your website accordingly.

How do I increase Core Web Vitals in WordPress?

If you search on the web with this concern, you will realise that everyone is talking with very heavy terminology and geeky details that doesn’t make sense to a newbie. Ofcourse, as a newbie, it will be very complicated for you and you need something like this post of someone who can explain you in plain English about the ways and process to go through and steps to implement.

Choose a good hosting or server.

The very first step is choosing a good host i.e. you need to have a good server that complies with the requirements as set by Google.

This is one of the most confusing process to go through, as there are many hosting providers that claim to be good. I have created in-depth details about which hosting to ahead with. I have also discussed the features that you would need to consider for the best approach here.

For the best results, you should always try to have your website hosted on different server and your emails on the relevant domain to be hosted on a different server. This process will enable you to allocate proper resources to your website as needed. The server you would select for your website should be a better server and the server for your emails can be any type of server. There are servers available at very cheap rates as well, so don’t worry about costs at this stage, because for your emails you can always choose cheaper server. You just need to worry about email deliverability options.

How to set up these different servers will be discussed separately, as it is a bit lengthy and complicated process. But it is one of the best step to achieve the desired results.

While you choose your hosting, don’t go for cheap hosting companies, as they will give you the cheap rates to start with and then they will squeeze you at the time of renewal or they won’t give you the best services and eventually you will regret your decision. I have also recently known issues that many hosting companies sell out your data to other service providers and your contact number and mail box will be exploded with web development, SEO and many other offers.

Selling your data by many of these companies is not a new issue. It is one of the most well known when you buy your domain name. There are companies who will never let you hide your contact details from your domain and hence many companies can find your details and they will keep pushing you for their services. Hence, I always buy my domains from NameCheap and always recommend my clients, friends and family to buy their domains from NameCheap, as they offer complete privacy for free and lifetime DDOS protection. You can also buy your domain from my below referral link. Currently, they are offering 97% discount for the ongoing Black Friday rush. If you haven’t had one yet, it is the best time to get one.

Choose a proper theme to design your website.

As we are discussing about WordPress, this is the first step and it is always the best idea to choose a proper theme for the development of your WordPress website. I have discussed about choosing the best theme and which theme gives you the best options and features to get started here.

If you start with a good theme, your life will be much easier and your website or blog will give you the desired results from very beginning.

Choose proper plug-ins that don’t conflict.

Plug-ins play the most important role when you create your website with WordPress. Because the core WordPress these days come with Gutenberg editor only and which is getting hands on the modern culture and design and it looks eventually you will be able to create your website after few years with Gutenberg itself. Even today, there are few themes that can let you do that with some extra plug-ins and premium feature options.

However, in general, it is very hard to design a website without a plug-in. But depending on your server and hosting partner, it is very crucial that you plan what you want to achieve and which plug-ins would you need so that your plug-in may not conflict with each other. As every server or domain registrar have their own criterion and they always mention which plug-ins may conflict with their plug-ins and what features may not work in case. This situation may result into 403 error, which basically means that there is no permission allowed either by server or somehow it is not permitted on your website.

Improve your image sizes.

Image optimisation is one of the most crucial steps if you actually want your users to have amazing experience while exploring your site.

You should always try to upload optimised images i.e. image size should be reduced to maximum potential alongside keeping it fully responsive with a clear and crisp view. There are many businesses built around this particular niche and they only provide image optimisation services as well.

Get CDN and configure properly.

You should also consider CDN option. CDN means Content Delivery Network.

Basically it means everything on your website i.e. pages, posts, landing pages etc. will be delivered all over the world with a decent speed. As CDN companies manage your content on their system and they deliver your content to your audience whenever they try to access it anywhere on the planet with a much better speed compared to if the same content is directly loaded from your local server. I hope this make clear sense what a CDN is and why you need one in order to comply with google standards.

There are many hosting companies that provide CDN services themselves and many have integrated and partnered with other available options. It is a very hard game to plan and achieve the desired results, but if you check out my above images you will see my scores. It is one of my own business websites where I offer web development and digital marketing services.

So, before I start offering such lucrative results to my clients and start gaining business from them, I did it for myself. My practical approach has helped me learn lots of things on the way and now I can happily suggest and guide my potential clients.

Cloudflare is one of the most popular CDN service providers. It is free upto a limit and then they do charge you if you need some extra deep features. However, for most of the simple websites and personal blogs, Cloudflare will work fine. But please don’t confuse yourselves with hosting and CDN. You would need good options for both of these.

How do I check and monitor my Core Web Vitals?

There are many tools in the market where you can check your website score and find out what to improve. You can also ask your developers what needs to be edited or updated depending on the results you would see from these tools. There are many free and paid version of tools.

Mainly people look at Google’s Page Speed Insights page which is totally free, while there are other tools lie GTMetrix, Pingdom who give few features for free and they also charge for some premium features for instant GTMetrix would charge for mobile score etc. But when they charge they will give you in-depth analysis and more info compared to Google’s free page, as it is for developers and geeks.

Final Words

While it is very important to make your website score good as detailed at Core Web Vitals. It is not always manually possible to all the bits and pieces unless you yourselves are a developer or a Geek.

I have discussed most important aspects that you should consider and ask your developer as well to look for while designing or developing your website. There are a few plug-ins that actually help you boost your website optimisation and your overall score as well like Nitropack and WP Rocket. I would highly recommend to go for Nitropack, as currently they are offering the best black friday pricing. The best part is that they are offering a free plan as well. So once you go beyond your usage then only you start paying, until then you can signup and try & test it how it works for you.

If you still have any queries regarding Core Web Vitals or Web Development or any plug-ins or if you any specific concern, please don’t hesitate to get in touch or comment hereunder and I will come back to you as soon as possible.